We got over 2 000 — yeah, that’s two thousand — replies, and spent some time analyzing and grouping the feedback into actionable bug reports and general focus areas, which was then presented to the Mozilla team and worldwide community in a talk here in Mountain View & broadcast on Air Mozilla.

Unfortunately, the video recording was broken that day, but you can view the presentation slides in HTML5 format here. Copious amounts of presenter notes were added after the presentation was given, so you should be able to follow it even if you can’t see the recording.

The result of this presentation was that a number of bugs were filed under a “Paper Cuts” umbrella — in other words, the small, annoying issues that you encounter every day in any software — and an effort was started as part of the Firefox 4 effort to eliminate as many of these as we can during the beta period. They are similar in nature to what was called “polish” bugs in the Firefox 3 release cycle, but intentionally narrowly scoped, and managed aggressively to ensure that we have a smaller list that can be worked on.

What’s so special about Paper Cut bugs?

I’m glad you asked! The paper cut bugs are issues that are of particular importance to the User Experience team, and as such, we will give priority to help you fix these bugs. It means that we’ll go the extra mile to try and support anyone that helps us with fixing them — so please have a look at the list and see if there’s anything you think you’re capable of fixing, and feel free to contact me directly or post questions in the bugs themselves if you need clarifications or help.

Some paper cut bugs are complicated and require some re-architecting — for instance, the modal dialog issues currently being handled by Justin Dolske & others — but a lot of them are small, self-contained, and the perfect thing to work on while you’re waiting for review for other projects.

Our overall priorities

Of the 7 focus areas identified in the presentation, we chose to focus on two areas in particular for Firefox 4:

This doesn’t mean that the other bugs are any less important — but we obviously have to pick our battles to get stuff done. Don’t let this discourage you from handling bugs in the other focus areas, though!

Our current Paper Cut Heroes

Several of the bugs have seen significant activity over the past month, and I’ll try to call out progress and general awesomeness over the coming weeks. Currently, excellent work is being done on:

Eliminate modal dialogs — Justin Dolske & others have been working on moving all dialogs to be tab-specific instead of window-specific. This means that HTTP authentication dialogs and JavaScript pop-ups no longer force you to answer them before you can switch to a different tab.

Application updates in the background — Rob Strong is currently working on a service that downloads & applies Firefox application updates transparently in the background, which means you don’t have to wait for the “Firefox is applying your updates” dialog when starting the browser anymore.

Add-on updates in the background — Dave Townsend, Jennifer Boriss and the rest of the team behind the new add-ons manager have made sure that updates to add-ons are less annoying, and don’t happen on startup anymore. You can still turn on explicit notification of updates if that’s how you roll, but it’s now automatic and transparent for most people.

…and lots of other issues, more updates to come in the next few weeks.

Want to help out?

This week’s selection of paper cuts that we are currently looking for help in resolving:

Bug #78414 — Application shortcut keys (keyboard commands such as F11, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+R) fail to operate when plug-in (Flash, Acrobat, QuickTime) has focus. This is mostly working on OS X, but Windows still has this problem. In general, any qualified keyboard shortcut shouldn’t be sent to the plugin, but go to the browser.

Bug #566489 — Enable inline autocomplete again for URLs, but make it smarter. With the introduction of the Awesome Bar, we stopped “Speaking URL,” which affects our perceived performance, since it takes longer to enter a URL than it did before.

Bug #565104 — Stop sites from opening popup or popunder windows, even in response to clicks. There’s a new type of “pop-under” that seems to be done by triggering a window open and then quickly focusing back on the current window. There’s no conceivable use for this in a web page/app, so this order of events should be detected, and disallowed.

Bug #565760 — “Forget this password/login” on right click. It should be possible to remove a saved password from a form that is currently storing it.

Alex Limi is currently
VP Design at
Highfive,
a company that is simplifying business collaboration.
Previously, he led FirefoxUX& Product Design at Mozilla,
designed at Google& is the co-founder of the open source project
Plone.